“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“All great artists and thinkers are great workers.”

“The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.”

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

“You will not get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.”

“You shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: you must be proud of your foes. Thus have I already taught.”

“Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself”